


Everest

by Mariquita



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Creation Myth, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-05 04:37:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14036322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mariquita/pseuds/Mariquita
Summary: In the beginning there was nothing except God, who does not show himself--and his angels.





	Everest

When Castiel sets foot on Earth for the first time, he notices how small it is. He towers over everything. His shadow blocks the little sunlight that seeps through the dark clouds surrounding him.

“You downsize,” Gabriel tells him. He is a pinprick of light traversing the stratosphere.

So Castiel shrinks to a size the Earth can contain and he looks around. The world is so jagged and dark and recent, so unlike home, that it startles him. He hears giant waves crashing against giant waves, hears thunder resounding overhead. There is a constant deep howling that he realizes is the wind. Then he sees the clouds, the same clouds that had just enveloped him, rolling over the horizon, dark and dismal and absolute, just like the entity in his older brothers’ stories. The one they cannot name out loud.

Castiel moves over craggy rocks and he finds himself standing where land meets water and he wonders what makes this collection of lifeless and inferior things so special.

“We are tasked to protect this,” Gabriel says, manifesting alongside him in his true form.

Castiel draws his wings closer. Gabriel is terrifying, golden-winged, and beautiful—one of the firsts and meticulously crafted. Castiel beside him is a little unpolished and coarsely hewn, having been created much later by hands that were already uninspired, that had done this a hundred times before.

“There is nothing here to protect,” Castiel answers gravely, his voice a deep rumble that agitates the ground. Gabriel sighs and lifts a hand that calms the sea.

“Look closer,” Gabriel points to the shoreline. Something ink-black and ugly is crawling out of the water. It hauls itself up on webbed feet and scans its surroundings with eyes like beads. Castiel bends lower to examine it. Up close, it isn’t all black. There are specks of other hues, iridescent in the half-dark. Castiel is about to reach out and touch it when the creature slips under a rock.

“Such a small life, isn’t it?” Gabriel says and Castiel almost asks him what constitutes as “small.”

A loud thunder and the clouds are suddenly ablaze with lighting. They turn their heads to the sky and there are streaks of light piercing through the dark, casting pools of silver over land and water. Castiel knows that Gabriel is listening to their father who does not show himself except to a chosen few. There is suddenly an ache in the depths of his grace.

“Father said we can make some final touches,” Gabriel says, jaws clenched, eyebrows knitted in confusion. “Walk with me, Castiel.”

So Castiel does. He walks, mindful of the little things beneath his feet. Castiel sees colors he still cannot name, but will later—millions of years from now—classify as green, all shades of it, and one in particular that will remain elusive, nameless, that will shift as the seasons shift—speckled with blue in sunlight, nebulous russet sometimes in the shadows. He will treasure that green, burn it on the back of his skull, will scour the earth at the end of time for a similar shade but nothing will compare.

They travel to the depths of the sea where Gabriel proclaims that it’s not deep enough so he strikes the seabed once and creates an abysmal rift. On land, Gabriel carves out red dirt and rock and fills it with water. Elsewhere, he opens the ground and drills portals to the very heart of the Earth. Here and there he scatters cliffs and canyons; rakes paths for water to fall in torrents over crags. He molds caverns and lines them with beautiful and intricate bone-white rock and then, ever the trickster, buries the caverns’ mouths with dirt. He builds mountains and ridges that draw out like veins on the face of the Earth; carves out lakes and channels to the sea. If there is order in the way Gabriel forms the land, Castiel does not see it or does not understand it. He stands apart from his brother, watching him create more chaos out of chaos.

Then, finally, Gabriel commands the patch of land beneath them to rise and continue rising until, by the pull of the Earth’s own gravity, it is impossible for it to rise any further. Gabriel caps the summit with ice. He is breathing heavily after, anger just undulating underneath his features. Castiel wonders what their father had told him to warrant such a reaction.

And as if hearing Castiel’s thoughts, Gabriel says, “That fish you saw? Its descendants will one day rule this Earth and they will have eternal light and they will have a place beside us at home.” Gabriel eyes the horizon. No, he looks beyond the clouds.

“Let this be a challenge then for that fish,” Gabriel says, proud of the mountain he’s made that’s higher than the highest clouds. “Let him climb. Let him earn his place beside us.”

Castiel stays silent, watches the stars. The universe is so vast and unending and beautiful that it’s a shame not to share it.

“Let him try,” Gabriel says, voice now somehow subdued. “He will never make it up here, and there’s the joke.”

With a wave of his hand, Gabriel shakes the Earth causing a tidal wave to submerge the shoreline they were previously standing on. Castiel thinks it’s cruel. After all, the color of the fish reminds him of his own wings.

Years later, long after Gabriel disappears, Castiel will chance upon two climbers traversing the mountain’s northeastern ridge. They have come a long way: stripped of their ink-black skin and webbed feet, taller now and muscle-bound. They have come to resemble Castiel’s kind but wingless and a little unpolished and coarsely hewn. They will be meters away from the summit before succumbing to the tremendous cold. The wind will cover their bodies in snow.

“You should have made it higher,” Castiel will say to no one but the wind.

 

-END-

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a short thing that was supposed to be part of a longer thing. But then the longer thing took a different turn and ended up somewhere entirely new. Also, I love it that you can actually do anything with this fandom and it will end up somehow making sense.


End file.
